Why People Are Buying $8,000 Lifelike Baby Dolls

Kelli Maple tenderly sets her bundle of joy, Naomi, into a Nuna car seat and drives her to the mall.

When they arrive, Maple, 23, places little Naomi, dressed in a onesie and hair bow, into a high-end stroller (complete with a portable sound machine, stuffed animal and a pacifier). Giggling, Maple and Naomi shop for tiny clothes.

Most passersby would mistake them for a typical mother and daughter.

But Naomi is not real.

She’s a lifelike “reborn doll.” These collectable baby dolls, which can run up to $10,000 apiece, have been around since the early 2000s, but in recent years they’ve exploded into a global phenomenon.

Collectors, who consider themselves parents, shell out for luxury baby gear and dote on their reborns as if they were human children.

In Brazil, they’ve become a lightning rod in recent months, with politicians introducing bills to try and ban the popular dolls from public places.

The reborn doll world is hidden in plain sight in the United States.

It’s a cottage industry, with amateur crafters hand-moulding and painting dolls in their basements. The process, especially for the more verisimilitudinous silicone dolls, is labour-intensive, including painting delicate pale-blue veins onto their soft peachy skin and hand-rooting individual goat or alpaca hairs into their scalps and eyebrows. The result is uncanny.

When I told a dollmaker that I’ve never seen someone carrying a reborn in New York, she smiled knowingly and said, “You have.”

Detractors find the dolls creepy, and some owners say they are taunted by families and online bullies.

What these critics misunderstand, collectors say, is the therapeutic potential of the dolls.

Women who have lost babies or experienced miscarriages are comforted by reborns. The dolls can also soothe women with post-traumatic stress disorder, Alzheimer’s, dementia and autism.

Britney Spears, who said she had a miscarriage, has been seen carrying a doll. Some women are fanatic collectors, amassing dozens if not hundreds of dolls and posting online videos of diaper changes and trips to the park. Children and teens play with them. Hollywood snaps them up as stunt babies.

At the Dolls of the World fair this June, around 1,500 participants—and their dolls—came together in a convention centre in Greensboro, N.C., where vendors sold accessories such as perfumes meant to make the dolls smell like real babies.

“People think it’s insane because it’s a doll,” said Hannah Hammond, 21, a teacher in Hampton, Va., who collects reborns. “But it’s just like any other hobby.” When we met, she offered to let me hold her prized silicone doll, Evie, then winced at my technique: “You have to support her head.”

Babies Who Never Cry

Maple is one of the stars of the reborn doll world, with over 2 million subscribers to her YouTube channel and selling her dolls for thousands of dollars.

At the Dolls of the World expo, she was mobbed by fans for selfies and autographs.

She had spent months in the room she calls her “nursery,” putting the finishing touches on babies to sell at her booth at the fair. “There are heads and limbs everywhere—it can be a little scary,” she said.

Awareness of the dolls is at an all-time high. “It’s just getting bigger and stronger,” said Dave Stack, the founder of Reborns.com, one of the largest marketplaces for handmade dolls. He charges $30 a month for makers to sell their dolls on the site, and has around 600 paying members.

Many of those makers were at the fair in North Carolina, one of a handful of American events where enthusiasts and dealers can buy and sell dolls, and take classes in the art of dollmaking. At evening events, women trade gifts like pacifiers and doll outfits, and awards are bestowed to the top artisans.

The doll fair was one of three conferences taking place at the same sprawling Sheraton complex. Over the course of one sweltering summer weekend, the doll people rubbed elbows with the brawny participants in the World Ninja League championships and the conspiracy theorists of the Cosmic Summit.

“We all thought they were real babies until we did not hear any crying,” marvelled Cosmic Summit attendee Ocean Norris while taking a smoke break. Her friend Angela Simmons of Pinehurst, N.C., said she was “shocked” to see the babies being handled like real babies.

“Unfortunately, we get a lot of hate in the doll community,” said Sally McMahon of Massapequa Park, N.Y., who dressed in a fairy outfit and showed off her rabbit-human hybrid doll.

This is part of a subset known as “fantasy dolls”—creatures such as chimp-human hybrids, blue-skinned lizard elves, and tiny-horned satyrs. “They say, ‘Oh my God, these crazy doll people.”

For the doll lovers, from small children to senior citizens in wheelchairs, the fair is a rare safe space for them to revel in their hobby.

Many of them budget the entire year to be able to pay cash for four-figure dolls and accessories (“I plan on spending a kidney, a lung and part of my liver,” joked attendee Mel Harrison on Facebook).

They clamoured around the reborn world’s niche celebrity doll artists, like Maple and the British duo Samantha Gregory and Nikki Johnston, asking for autographs and selfies. All around the hotel, groups clustered, with women and children passing babies around.

While reborn lovers find them comforting, the outside world often perceives them as terrifying. The Apple TV+ show “Servant,” which ran from 2019 to 2023, dramatised the spooky nature of reborn dolls.

Maggie Barnes, 12, from Clayton, N.C., showed me her new doll: Fang, a miniature werewolf. Barnes said she liked coming to the fair because “People are not judgmental at all.” Her mother, also a doll fan, purchased the $1,000 doll for her as a gift.

Although the best-known use for reborn dolls is as a comfort following infant loss and miscarriage, plenty of kids, as well as mothers and grandmothers of real children, collect the dolls. Keith and Dia Harris, 63 and 51 of Suwanee, Ga., have five children and seven grandchildren, and attended the fair with a baby reborn and a 6-year-old reborn.

Keith, hoisting the bigger doll around in a carrier, was one of the many supportive husbands at the fair. At their home, the Harrises have a nursery for their reborns with bunkbeds, which their grandkids share with the dolls when they visit.

Another grandmother, Holly Church, came to the fair to purchase a $3,200 green-skinned fantasy doll to add to her collection. Her husband was building a “she shed” in their backyard in Texas to house the dolls. She said that her eldest son didn’t understand her passion. “I say, ‘You don’t have to get it. You just have to respect it.’”

Church’s friend Mia Martone, a spiritual advisor in East Meadow, N.Y., purchased a $6,000 silicone reborn named Lucy at the fair. While she has grandchildren who visit, she said, “Sometimes I just want one that doesn’t cry.”

Reborns can help people heal from trauma. Katherine Hansell of St. Charles, Mo., cares for Crystal, her adopted adult daughter who experienced horrific childhood abuse. They use a reborn baby named Crystal to model love and care. “We say that this Crystal was never hurt,” said Hansell.

A Labour of Love

Making dolls can be an emotional job.

Dorothy Blue, a reborn dollmaker who works out of a basement studio in Dardenne Prairie, Mo., said that working with women who’d gone through infant loss and wanted a replica could be fraught. Sometimes, their vision of what the doll should look like could be hard to capture. “To be blunt, a deceased baby looks like a deceased baby,” said Blue.

Well-made silicone dolls can easily sell for over $5,000, because the labour that goes into them is significant. Most dollmakers start with a basic kit from one of the online retailers such as Bountiful Baby.

Then they personalise it through a painstaking process of tweaking and painting, often in dialogue with the client, who may have photos of what they want the doll to look like. Vinyl kits usually start around $100 and silicone kits run about $200. With products including paint, finishing powder, glass eyes and hair, the supplies for one doll can easily run over $500.

America has a long tradition of resourceful women cobbling together careers from home. Like selling Mary Kay beauty products or Tupperware, dollmaking can be a way to make money without a fancy education, or even consistent childcare.

Few people have gotten rich from the doll world, because it’s such a splintered, handmade process. But Nevin and Denise Pratt of Bountiful Baby in Salt Lake City are titans in the reborn community.

In 2000, Denise’s doll making spurred the duo to begin making moulds, which grew into a significant doll supply company. At its height in 2019, the company says its revenue was over $5 million. It’s 40% less today, which they attribute to a volatile economy and Chinese-made knockoff dolls and parts sold on sites like Amazon and Alibaba.

This year, Maple only sold three of her handmade dolls, compared to five at the last fair. “Sales have been down all year because of the economy.”

But for Maple and others in the reborn doll industry, it’s much more than a business. “I’ve gone through lots of different emotional things throughout my life and the dolls have definitely helped with mental health a lot,” she said.

Johnston, the British dollmaker, compared reborn dolls to Marmite, the divisive yeasty spread: “You either love them or you hate them.”

What’s more important than being a good employee right now? Looking like a good employee in the eyes of AI productivity trackers that more managers are using to evaluate their teams.

Employee-monitoring systems are especially popular at tech companies and are also used by other white-collar firms that want to probe how people spend company time. The scary thing: You might not even know you’re being watched because many states don’t require disclosure.

Metrics can include performance data that is undoubtedly relevant, such as sales results. But it also can employ dubious proxies like keyboard strokes and how often your computer screen goes into sleep mode.

We generally accepted, or at least understood, heightened surveillance during the work-from-home era. Back then it seemed reasonable for bosses to keep tabs on employees they couldn’t see.

Yet the oversight has only escalated, and tensions are rising, too.

A group of former Meta Platforms employees alleges in a lawsuit that the company used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” when it began laying off about 10% of its workforce in May. Meta says humans make termination calls.

However that case shakes out, a couple of things are clear. Companies eager to gauge which employees are locked in now have sophisticated AI monitoring systems at their disposal. And they believe they have leverage in a tepid labor market.

So while we may chafe at having our worth reduced to numbers on the boss’s productivity dashboard, we have to play the game as it’s being played. Here are some tips, based on conversations with people who make employee monitoring systems—and others who game the systems.

Be meticulous about your calendar

Calendar integration is one way that productivity trackers have gotten more advanced and, ostensibly, fairer.

Let’s say you make an old-fashioned phone call or attend an in-person meeting. Your Outlook or Slack status may switch to “away,” making you appear as inactive as if you were taking an extended coffee break.

Employee monitors like one made by a company called Insightful cross-check your online status with your calendar to see whether there is a valid reason for your apparent inactivity. If that call or meeting is on your schedule, then the system will recognize that you are busy offline. If nothing is on the books, it could look like you’re slacking off.

Hit the activity sweet spot, around 80%

Let’s not go any further without addressing the underlying question: How much downtime is permissible during the workday? After all, people have been scared to let managers see anything non-work-related on their screens since personal computers first arrived in offices.

No one knows this better than Roger Wagner, who is widely credited with creating the first “boss button” in the early 1980s. He designed a keyboard shortcut to instantly display a spreadsheet if the boss walked by your cubicle while you were playing a computer game. Boss buttons have been features of countless diversions since. (I confess to using one built into a March Madness streaming app.)

Wagner, the founder of computer-education company 1010 Technologies, says his original design was a joke—more of a commentary on overbearing managers than a cover for lazy employees. Good bosses understand workers need mental breaks throughout the day, he says.

This matches what I heard from Insightful Chief Executive Ivan Petrovic. He says customers that use his company’s workforce-management platform don’t expect employees to stay on task 100% of the time.

“On average companies are aiming for 60% to 80% of your time being utilized for work during the day,” he says.

Go ahead and exhale. It’s probably OK to watch an occasional YouTube video at your desk.

And if you’re going to artificially inflate your activity level, be careful. Hitting 90% could look suspicious.

Get physical

So don’t leave your mouse jiggler on all day. Choose the right one if you must resort to shenanigans.

There are lots of software applications that mimic the movements of a computer mouse, so you can appear to be working while away from your desk. There are also devices that plug into computer ports and do the same thing.

Corporate cybersecurity systems increasingly block these apps and devices, and productivity trackers claim to be able to detect them. But some workers swear by mouse docks, like one made by Tech8 USA, that keep cursors moving. The company originally made mouse-moving software but now focuses on physical jigglers.

“People are drawn to mechanical solutions because they’re so simple and don’t require software,” says Tech8 Marketing Director Sam Matthews. “As monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, that distinction has become even more relevant.”

Use AI, but not too much

Another popular metric for employee-monitoring systems is AI usage. Companies want to know who is embracing new tools, and it can be tempting to think more is better.

“There’s a performative aspect where employees overblow their usage of AI so that they appear relevant in the organization,” says Andrea Derler, principal researcher at Visier, which helps companies track and analyze employee work habits.

In a recent Visier survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 48% admitted to exaggerating their AI usage.

This is already an outdated strategy. Using AI for everything used to score points for experimentation. Now it can seem wasteful because many companies are watching AI token spending more carefully.

Look, productivity theater has always been part of work. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat the system, but expectations are changing so quickly that we need to be savvy about what the latest employee trackers are looking for.

Sometimes it takes a little gamesmanship to get full credit for our contributions.